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It’s Not Time to Say Goodbye to the GNU GPL
https://martin.kleppmann.com/2021/04/14/goodbye-gpl.html I saw this post on Hacker News, and before I could reply, someone flagged it. Oh well. So I’ll post my thoughts on it here… First, it’s unfortunate that this post start out with (well-intentioned but probably compulsive) flame-bait about Richard Stallman, which is likely to derail the discussion. Anyway the author is arguing […]
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Symlink Argument Order
I always forget the order of arguments to ln -s. It’s a problem. So here’s my handy-dandy way of remembering it, as a blog post:
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Moving on from Chisel
Once upon a time, I worked at a company that heavily contributed to and used Chisel (a Verilog generator using a Scala DSL). Now, roughly 3 years later, I tried to make a fun little hardware design using Chisel. I remembered that the people who were contributing to Chisel liked to break backward compatibility for […]
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Numato Lab and Questionable Product Descriptions
I’m mad. I bought an FPGA board, then discovered that one of the primary features I wanted is missing. How? Well, the website of the manufacturer is seemingly (to me) deceptive. Take a look: https://numato.com/product/mimas-a7-mini-fpga-development-board/ Now, looking at that page, does this board support programming via USB only? If you’re looking at it with a […]
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Configuring the Linux Kernel from MacOS
I use a beefy build server to do my Linux Kernel compiles. I use github workflows to do the compile in an unattended fashion. I don’t want to SSH into the server to run make menuconfig. What do I do? I use a Macbook as my daily driver. It would be nice if I could […]
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A Flowchart to Understand Windows vs Linux Driver Development Challenges
I made this little flowchart to collect my thoughts on driver development in the Windows vs Linux ecosystems. Uploading it here so I can refer back to it when the need arises.
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Linux Laptop Manufacturers Aren’t Trying Very Hard
Found this excellent blog post: https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/82328.html This echoes most of what I’ve been feeling about the state of “Linux Laptops”. They’re mostly a scam. Dell slaps stock Ubuntu, plus some preloaded drivers, onto a laptop and calls it “Linux Edition”. System76 isn’t any better. They also slap a custom Ubuntu derivative distro on there, which […]
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It’s Not Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware
Here’s an interesting talk: As you can tell from the title, I disagree. For some reason it blows people’s minds when they realize that most of the code on their PC is running in some embedded chip in a peripheral just moving data around. They think it’s meaningful. It’s not. These peripherals provide a stable […]
